Wait, it’s real?! The adorable true love story behind Netflix’s Nobody Wants This

I genuinely feel like it’s been forever since a great rom-com series came out on Netflix, but we have Nobody Wants This to thank for ending the drought. The show is the cutest love story ever, and what’s even more amazing is that Nobody Wants This is based on an actual true love story between the show’s creator, Erin Foster, and her husband. I guess rom-com dreams do come true!

The story behind the 10-episode series began in 2018, where Erin Foster met her husband in a gym in LA (which isn’t actually accurate to their dinner party meet-cute in the show). They got engaged in 2019, and her idea for a show was born when she began converting to Judaism for her now-husband Simon Tikhman.

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Whilst she was in the process of converting, Foster’s manager suggested that she write a show to document her experience titled Shiksha (named after the word for a non-Jewish woman). She got on so well with writing it and said on her podcast the concept “clicked” with her, and it ended up as a Netflix series. Podcast, you say? Yes, the podcast that the sisters put on is real and called The World’s First Podcast. She hosts it with her sister Sara Foster.

However, there’s one big difference between the show and reality: Noah was still the inspiration behind Noah in Nobody Wants This, but the true story is that he isn’t actually a rabbi. Although, that detail didn’t seem to affect the meaning behind the show – Erin was more focused on making sure Noah was “emotionally available, chivalrous, old-fashioned … but also really funny and confident.” It was all about matching the characters’ compatibility to their real-life chemistry.

Noah’s character also mirrors Simon’s family history and upbringing, being from Jewish Russian immigrants. “We didn’t come from similar backgrounds,” Foster explained. “He came from a much more traditional place. I came from a more unconventional place. When we got together we were like, ‘How’s this gonna work?'”

Well, they made it work after all, and unlike the show, Noah’s mother was actually very supportive of the couple. Erin did mention that sometimes “you have to have conflict for a TV show so you have to create people pushing back against the relationship.”

via Netflix

Remember the cringeworthy sunflowers scene in episode six? It’s REAL. In the episode, fittingly titled The Ick, Noah meets Joanne’s parents for the first time and shows up in a weird outfit and a bunch of sunflowers for them. Joanne immediately gets the ick and she wants to break up with him on the spot. Sad as it is, it comes from Erin and Simon’s real relationship. When the two started dating in 2018, Tikhman brought a huge bouquet of sunflowers to meet Foster’s mother for the first time, which freaked Erin out.

“The flowers were so long, and they kept falling over,” Erin told New York Magazine. “Sitting there, I was like, ‘Well, if someone cares this much, then that feels like a weakness.’”

Simon remembers it a little differently: “I personally don’t remember the sunflowers being that big. But I do remember driving home and thinking, ‘it’s not about the flowers.’”

via Netflix

The sunflowers aren’t the only ick from Erin’s personal store: She personally can’t stand men running with a backpack on or chasing a ping pong ball (both things she mentions on the show). Remind me to look away if I ever catch a man doing any of these things.

Nobody Wants This is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

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